dklassen - on a few of your points:

2 - The problem with insurance companies is that they treat sick people like a product. That's fine when you're talking about cars or refrigerators. But these are *people*. You can NOT treat health insurance as if it were "any other industry". That's the one thing that left a bad taste in my mouth when working at Beth Israel Hospital. I loved the fact that we were trying to offer better care and do it more efficiently (because the insurance companies had us by the short and curlies) but there was also a push to "fill the beds" - more inpatient admissions. That part didn't make me feel too good. It's ok for GM to drop an unprofitable product line. Is it ok for Aetna, et al., to do the same with people?

3. Won't happen the way you think. Insurers, as they have been doing for nearly 25 years, will simply drop the unprofitable segments. I feel no pity for them. They're the ones who decided, rightly or wrongly, that the shareholders were more important than the subscribers.

Regarding your Obama quote. I'm searching all over the web and all I'm finding are people who SAY Obama said this, but I can't find it. Even people claiming that a brietbart.com sourced quote says it can't point to it. I've found dozens of references on the first several Google pages - but no actual quote. I've found references to the unemployment rate being 7.6% when he said it. But, again, no actual quote.

The closest I've been able to find is a story on MSNBC.COM from January 9 that says the President-Elect said that if the stimulus didn't go far enough, we could expect "double digit unemployment" and worse. Now from everything I'm reding, unemployment, which is a lagging, as opposed to leading, economic indicator is levelling off. Granted it's just over 10%, but I also have been reading about how states aren't exactly spending the stimulus money quickly - been very slow to get to hiring.

Where does this confidence in government come from? I think you're proceeding from a false assumption. It's not a confidence in government. Obama wasn't elected because all those people agreed with him in lock-step. It's largely because of the people who believed the new John McCain's policy of "more of the same" would be even worse. My older daughter (who just graduated college) said they were terming these people "Obamicans" as the exact opposite of what happened when we coined the term "Reagan Democrats".

And if you believe revenues will continue to decline, you haven't been paying attention to the GDP lately.

Of course, I have no faith in our government to hold the line on spending when revenues grow from the inevitable recovery (strong or weak). They'll take it as a sign to spend even more.